Burgers and Franks Go Over the Top at Prontito in Queens

Slide Show | Glorious Excess at Prontito in Queens Extravagance — and generosity — define the restaurant’s menu, a catalog of ornately swagged hot dogs and hamburgers that look designed with a snake’s jaws in mind.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

September 7, 2017

Hungry City

By LIGAYA MISHAN

It’s hard to know whether to eat a cholado or sip it, or to somehow try both at once. Better just to say that you submit to it, this red-orange tower of fruit, ice and condensed milk like a mashed-up sunrise.

At Prontito, in Elmhurst, Queens, a cholado begins with pulverized ice, chiming at the bottom of a cup. Passion fruit and blackberry syrups trickle down, and then a pileup of fruit summons every gradation of sweetness: fleshy chunks of guanabana (soursop), pineapple, papaya, mango, banana and strawberries; crisp, bracing apple and honeydew melon; a tatting of grated coconut.

All is drowned in lechera (condensed milk). The fruit half-melts, half-swims, and the lechera rests lazily on the tongue, like a custard that couldn’t be bothered to set. Passion fruit seeds snap. A maraschino cherry rests on top, alien red, stem askew, as if seconds from being sucked under.

A cholado is Colombia’s gift to the world, a red-orange tower of tropical fruit, pulverized ice and condensed milk.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

This costs $6. It could not be more luxurious if it were a cup of boiled gold. And why stop now? For another dollar, you may add a scoop of helado (ice cream), then toddle heavily, happily home.

Cholados are Colombia’s gift to the world. Here, they are made by Dira Llanos, a native of Santuario in western Colombia, and her husband, Douglas Cevallos, who grew up in Santa Ana, El Salvador, and has learned her recipes. They work in the kitchen alongside Ms. Llanos’s mother and sister, turning out some of New York’s finest cholados, raspados (the same ingredients, minus the fruit) and salpicóns (fruit half-smashed so the juices run, with a crimson seep of grenadine).

The excess — I think of it as generosity — spills over to the rest of the menu, a catalog of ornately swagged hot dogs and hamburgers that look designed with a snake’s jaws in mind. A super perro mix is a hot dog simply boiled in water (some vendors in Colombia use Coca-Cola) and buried so deep it’s invisible, under a crumble of potato chips, frilly bacon, carrot-cabbage slaw, costeño cheese in ivory curls, pineapple sauce like pulped sun, and ketchup and mayonnaise merged into creamy-sweet salsa rosada.

Hard-boiled quail eggs anchor each end, impaled on toothpicks.

The hamburguesa Prontitos deploys the same sauces, bacon and chips, adding ham, two slices of white American cheese (above the burger, melted and oozing, and below, stretchy but still intact), lettuce, tomato and grilled onions, with a quail egg affixed to the top like a white flag. It arrives as if frozen mid-landslide.

Douglas Cevallos runs Prontito with his wife, Dira Llanos, a native of Santuario in western Colombia.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

The quality of the hot dog and the burger themselves is beside the point. It’s the gleeful abundance that matters, the counterpoints of salt and sugar, crunch and yield, spikiness and velvet. French fries, on the other hand, are exemplars of the form, crispy even under a siege of mozzarella, holding their own against squeaky hot dog nubs ensnared in the cheese.

When Ms. Llanos and Mr. Cevallos first opened Prontito in 2006, it was just a takeout window that shared a storefront with a laundromat. Last October, they moved to a larger space half a mile away on a quiet side street off Roosevelt Avenue. Now, there are counters along the walls and a long, high communal table lit by Edison bulbs in a chandelier of iron pipes. A poster of Psalm 91 in Spanish hangs in a corner, across from a hallucinatory mural that pictures a blue-eyed hamburger who could be cousin to Oscar the Grouch, and a hot dog snoozing in its bun.

Prontito is Spanish slang for quick and snappy, but the food here isn’t. It takes time to build monuments; best to call ahead or settle in. The staff is patient with English speakers and sometimes protective, as when I asked to try champus. “Do you know the taste?” the woman at the cashier asked gently. “Some people really don’t like it.”

It turned out to be an indigenous drink of dried corn simmered and stirred with panela (unrefined cane sugar), broken-down pineapple and lulo, a fruit with a clean tang and citrus sting. It tasted like pineapple talked down from the ledge, its sweetness tuned down from a shriek to a whisper.